The French Revolution

Essential Questions

• What changes in political and economic conditions in the 1700s led to the crisis of the late 1700s and the outbreak of the French Revolution?

• How important in causing the French Revolution were the new Enlightenment ideas about natural rights, democracy, limited government, religious tolerance, and the use of reason in solving social and political problems?

• What, if anything, could king Louis XVI have done differently to keep the rising anger and frustration in France from triggering a full-scale revolution?

Essential Questions (continued)

• What role did the poor people of Paris and peasants in the countryside play in shaping the Revolution and the way it unfolded?

• Why did the Revolution go through the violent phase known as the Reign of Terror? Was that phase inevitable?

• In what ways did the Revolution fail, in what ways was it thwarted or reversed, and in what ways were its basic ideas and ideals realized?

King James I of England

Absolutism

• Absolute monarchs didn’t share power with a counsel or parliament

• “Divine Right of Kings”

The Seigneurial System

Receiving a seigneurial grant

• Feudal method of land ownership and organization

• Peasant labor

Louis XIV

• Ruled from 1643–1715• Reduced the power of

the nobility• Fought four wars• Greatly increased

France’s national debt

The Seven Years’ War

Louis XV

French and English troops fight at the battle of Fort St. Philip on the island of Minorca

• Louis XV

• War fought in Europe, India, North America

• France ends up losing some of its colonial possessions

• Increases French national debt

The Three Estates

• First Estate: clergy• Second Estate: nobility• Third Estate: the rest

of society• The Estates General

Cartoon depicting the three Estates

The Third Estate

• Taxation• Crop failures

Movements that led to a Revolution

• The Enlightenment• New Ideas about society and government.

• The American Revolution• France supported the colonists against Great Britain.

John Locke Marquis de Lafayette

Financial Crisis

• Jacques Necker• Tax on property• Calling of the Estates

General

The Estates General

• One vote per estate• Clergy and nobility

usually joined together to out vote the Third Estate

• Met in Versailles in May 1789

• Voting controversy A meeting of the Estates General

The National Assembly• The Third

Estate took action and established its own government.

• On June 17, 1789, the National Assembly was formed

Confrontation with the King• Louis XVI

ordered the Third Estate locked out of the National Assembly’s meeting hall.

• The Tennis Court Oath

• The king reverses his position.